Jennifer McPhee
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 07/01) - Bill Nasogaluak is explaining his idea for the mural painting workshop he's teaching in late October.

Actually, he's sketching it.

"I sketch everything," says the internationally known artist. "I even sketch my haircuts."

He draws an elderly Dene woman dressed in a blue jacket, pink scarf, long dress, moccasins and slip-on rubber boots. Her attire has religious connotations, he explains.

"People see these women year after year in Yellowknife," he says as he works. "I believe we take seeing them for granted. In the next ten years, they will be almost gone."

The woman is walking along a snow path surrounded by typical Yellowknife landscape -- stunted trees and rocks.

"She's walking along the path she has chosen," says Nasogaluak.

A lone raven flying on the right is balanced by a moon on the left. The moon, like the elderly woman, is in its last phase.

Nasogaluak and six others to be selected by the Aurora Arts Society will paint the eight-by-12-foot mural at Nor-Art. It will hang outside the Yellowknife Inn.

The students will also have input into the painting's concept.

"I think it's going to be a good learning experience for everyone, including me," says Nasogaluak.

This isn't the first mural the stone and snow sculptor has painted in Yellowknife.

During the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he painted a tongue-in-cheek mural inspired by Michelangelo outside the Magic Touch Laundromat on Franklin Avenue.

In the mural, God reaches out to touch Lewinsky's famously stained blue dress.

"It goes to show that if she had used Magic Touch Dry Cleaning, there would have been no scandal," he says with a smile.